European democracies have grown ethnically diverse in the recent years. Yet, ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in politics. Despite the theoretical argument asserting that ethnic minorities should perform better in systems allowing voters to cast intra party preferences, empirical studies bring mixed results. In particular, scholars highlight the role of both parties and voters in explaining the electoral success or failure of ethnic minority candidates. Using data on regional elections between 1995 and 2014 in Brussels, our study shows that even though parties have made gradual efforts to include ethnic minorities on their lists, voters appear to be an important force behind the election of ethnic minorities. We find variations according to party ideology, with socialist and – to a lesser extent – Christian democratic candidates benefiting the most from preferential voting. However, the positive impact of preference votes seems to decrease over time, as parties themselves become more inclusive and tend to allocate more realistic positions to their ethnic minority candidates in recent elections.

In the run up to the elections, parties have several ways of communicating with voters. In the current paper, we focus on one piece of the puzzle: advertisements of political parties in the mass media. More specifically, we are interested in the choice of candidates within these ads. In countries where parties are the dominant actor, they are faced with a choice: not all candidates can be promoted in the campaign, as this would be too costly and inefficient. Thus, the first question we want to answer is what factors determine candidate choice in political ads? Secondly, does candidate choice in political ads have an effect on the subsequent coverage in media as well? Agenda setting research has shown that as far as issues are concerned, ads do set the media agenda. We investigate whether this also holds for candidate choice. The results indicate that both internal party hierarchy, as well as external visibility of candidates determines candidate choice in political ads. Furthermore, the agenda setting effect of political ads is confirmed as well.